Posted in Books

The practical, down-to-earth, and beautifully-designed book, A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web, written and self-published by Mark Boulton, is available for purchase and download (as PDF) as of today.

In one of the main Exhibition Halls, the AIGA has a temporary bookstore set up with hundreds of books available about design, type, color, surface, theory… enough to make any designer drool and wish they had the entire collection available in their own library. While I love all kinds of design books, (Eames books are a favorite) I was disappointed that I wasn’t finding any related to design for the Web or multimedia. Then I came across this table. People all around me had no idea why I had whipped out my camera to take a picture of books sitting on a table, but I found these four to be in good company.

Eric Meyer came to the Bay Area this week to take care of business at Netscape’s headquarters in Mountain View. So while Eric was in town, he and I set up a time to meet each other and talk about the Wired News redesign. He came by our office this morning and we went over everything from high-level concerns of mine, to specific details of the markup and CSS. He even helped fix a couple of minor issues that happened to jump out at us while we were reviewing the site. We headed over to MoMo’s afterwards to grab lunch.

It was an honor (and a lot of fun) to spend just a few hours with Eric. He knows the CSS spec and browser rendering discrepancies better than I know the information on my own business card. He’s incredibly smart, very knowledgeable, and friendly to boot.

I now have three of the books he’s written about CSS, and I really like his writing style. The way he writes makes complex concepts easy to understand. He breaks ideas down into logical pieces, identifies and defines terms you should understand as you need them, and manages to do it all in a friendly, familiar tone that makes reading technical descriptions a pleasure. Whether you’re just a beginner and know very little about CSS, or you’ve been turning to CSS for a while now to make your life a lot easier, having a Meyer book nearby is a great reference and teaching tool for the details you can’t remember or understand.